Monthly Archives: February 2004

Costume, Staging Costs Hit$50,000 at Some Schools;Forcing Boys Into Lycra

By ROBIN SIDELMarch 25, 2006; Page A1

LEESPORT, Pa. — Dressed in a black unitard, leg warmers and a spiky light-and-dark gray wig, 15-year-old Deb Keller crawled on all fours. She arched her back, rolled her shoulders, pawed at her classmates — and tried not to get caught up in her tail.

For months, the redheaded sophomore has nursed a sore neck and aching shoulders. Every night before bed, she runs through a series of stretching exercises. She struggles to sing and dance at the same time without losing her breath.

Cats may seem to lead lives of leisure, but try being one. “It’s really physically tiring,” says Miss Keller, who is one of 68 cast members who are performing in “Cats,” the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical, this weekend at Schuylkill Valley High School.

A lot of scratch: Maine East High School in Park Ridge, Ill., spent about $50,000 on its production of ‘Cats.’

The high-school musical is an annual spring rite, and the hot new musical this year is “Cats,” which became available to high schools for the first time in January. Loaded with logistical challenges — from sophisticated electronic music to elaborate wigs that cause static when they get too close to wireless microphones — the show is creating headaches and busting budgets at high schools across the country. The show’s ornate costumes and a set that calls for truckloads of construction materials are producing a price tag that can be twice as high as a typical high-school play. And then there is the delicate matter of a show that requires teenage boys to wear skin-tight unitards.

“I would recommend it to other schools, but I wouldn’t recommend it lightly,” says Jeff Schaetzke, theater director at Dominican High School in Whitefish Bay, Wis. The parochial school spent $30,000 to stage “Cats” this month, about twice the amount that it spent on other recent productions such as “The Music Man” and “Footloose.”

“Cats” was one of Broadway’s most successful musicals. It ran for 18 years before closing in 2000. Based on the poetry of T.S. Eliot, “Cats” is about a group of felines that meet each year at the Jellicle Ball to select a cat that will ascend to the Heavyside Layer and be reborn. The cats make a pitch for the honor by telling the stories of their lives.

When it opened on Broadway in 1982, “Cats” drew as much attention for its production as for its plot. The music was heavily electronic and used synthesizers to make cat-like sounds. All cast members portrayed cats. The set of the play, which takes place in a junkyard, was built to the scale of a cat and featured enormous items, like a discarded oven and tire. A hole was punched in the roof of Manhattan’s Winter Garden Theater to accommodate the final scene in which the chosen cat, Grizabella, ascends to the heavens.

Popular with family audiences and featuring one of Broadway’s most-hummed songs, “Memory,” the show seems like natural high-school fare.

Still, it took R&H Theatricals, a Manhattan-based agency that licenses rights to productions on behalf of authors, a year to overhaul the show’s music so it would be manageable for a high-school production. The schools must follow the musical score provided by R&H but may arrange their own choreography.

“We wanted to make it more user-friendly to customers who didn’t have the financial or technological resources that the professionals did,” says Bruce Pomahac, director of music for R&H.

Even that wasn’t enough to ease the burden on musicians at Maine East High School in Park Ridge, Ill., which spent $20,000 more than usual to produce the show for a total cost of about $50,000. When the school staged the show earlier this month, sophomore John Pesce sat on a swivel chair so he could stretch out his arms to play two keyboards simultaneously. “I’m gonna die,” Mr. Pesce recalls one of his band mates saying during an early rehearsal.

Schuylkill Valley, a rural school about 60 miles east of Harrisburg, prides itself on tackling challenging productions for its spring musical. Last year’s show was “Seussical,” another show most high schools wouldn’t tackle. The school paid $3,400 to acquire the rights to “Cats.”

Kate Heffner, an English teach who directs the school’s musicals, first ran into trouble early in the year, when she tried to order costumes from the school’s regular supplier. There were none. And Robert Schramm, owner of Chicago’s Broadway Costumes Inc., was reluctant to begin such a labor-intensive project. The unitards needed to be painted by hand and then set with a special heating process so the colors wouldn’t bleed. The constant crawling would result in a lot of wear and tear, resulting in expensive and frequent replacements. And each wig would need to be shaped and sprayed as they were being made.

Because the school was a regular customer, Mr. Schramm finally relented. The company made 68 costumes and wigs for the regular price of about $10,000.

The costumes are a sensitive issue for the students. The unitards are skin-tight and although made of a heavy material, they show virtually every lump and bump on the body. Miss Heffner says some of the girls were dismayed when they tried on their costumes for the first time, but they were quickly comforted when she reminded them that their bathing suits were likely far more revealing.

Dressed in a black unitard and studded belt, Aaron Trasatt thrusts his hips forward and twirls his tail as Rum Tum Tugger, the cat clan’s equivalent of Don Juan. Of his skin-tight costume, “it just fits — to say the least,” the 17-year-old junior says with a chuckle.

The set provided another series of headaches. Unlike typical shows in which students and teachers scavenge props from their homes, the entire junkyard set at Schuylkill Valley had to be built from scratch, mostly with plywood and 2-by-4s. Everything in the junkyard setting had to be made to a scale of about four times the normal size — from crumpled soda cans to trash bags to an old tire.

And then there was Grizabella’s ascension at the end of the show. Unlike the Broadway theater, cutting a hole in the school’s roof wasn’t an option. The school improvised with a hand-operated hydraulic lift that raises senior Katie Scheidt 4 feet above a 4-foot-high platform.

Despite the hassles, schools that have performed “Cats” so far are pleased with the outcome. In addition to the physical conditioning, students say they have become more creative and observant of physical movement.

At Dominican High School in Wisconsin, the students also are learning a lesson in business: The school, which made its own costumes, hopes to recoup some of the expense by renting them out to other schools.

THERE’S a reason why ”Cats,” the British musical which opened at the Winter Garden last night, is likely to lurk around Broadway for a long time – and it may not be the one you expect.

It’s not that this collection of anthropomorphic variety turns is a brilliant musical or that it powerfully stirs the emotions or that it has an idea in its head. Nor is the probable appeal of ”Cats” a function of the publicity that has accompanied the show’s every purr since it first stalked London 17 months ago. No, the reason why people will hunger to see ”Cats” is far more simple and primal than that: it’s a musical that transports the audience into a complete fantasy world that could only exist in the theater and yet, these days, only rarely does. Whatever the other failings and excesses, even banalities, of ”Cats,” it believes in purely theatrical magic, and on that faith it unquestionably delivers.

THERE’S a reason why ”Cats,” the British musical which opened at the Winter Garden last night, is likely to lurk around Broadway for a long time – and it may not be the one you expect.

It’s not that this collection of anthropomorphic variety turns is a brilliant musical or that it powerfully stirs the emotions or that it has an idea in its head. Nor is the probable appeal of ”Cats” a function of the publicity that has accompanied the show’s every purr since it first stalked London 17 months ago. No, the reason why people will hunger to see ”Cats” is far more simple and primal than that: it’s a musical that transports the audience into a complete fantasy world that could only exist in the theater and yet, these days, only rarely does. Whatever the other failings and excesses, even banalities, of ”Cats,” it believes in purely theatrical magic, and on that faith it unquestionably delivers.

The principal conjurers of the show’s spell are the composer Andrew Lloyd Webber, the director Trevor Nunn and the designer John Napier. Their source material is T.S. Eliot’s one volume of light verse, ”Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats.” If the spirit of the Eliot poems is highly reminiscent of Edward Lear, the playful spirit of ”Cats” is Lewis Carroll, refracted through showbiz. Mr. Nunn and Mr. Napier in particular are determined to take us to a topsy-turvy foreign universe from the moment we enter the theater, and they are often more extravagantly successful at that here than they were in the West End ”Cats” or in their collaboration on ”Nicholas Nickleby.”

Certainly the Winter Garden is unrecognizable to those who knew it when. To transform this house into a huge nocturnal junkyard for Eliot’s flighty jellicle cats, Mr. Napier has obliterated the proscenium arch, lowered the ceiling and stage floor and filled every cranny of the place with a Red Grooms-esque collage of outsized rubbish (from old Red Seal records to squeezed-out toothpaste tubes) as seen from a cat’s eye perspective. Well before the lights go down, one feels as if one has entered a mysterious spaceship on a journey through the stars to a cloud-streaked moon. And once the show begins in earnest, Mr. Napier keeps his Disneyland set popping until finally he and his equally gifted lighting designer, David Hersey, seem to take us through both the roof and back wall of the theater into an infinity beyond.

The cast completes the illusion. Luxuriantly outfitted in whiskers, electronically glowing eyes, mask-like makeup and every variety of feline costume – all designed by Mr. Napier as well – a top-notch troupe of American singer-dancers quickly sends its fur flying in dozens of distinctive ways. It’s the highest achievement of Mr. Nunn and his associate director-choreographer, Gillian Lynne, that they use movement to give each cat its own personality even as they knit the entire company into a cohesive animal kingdom. (At other, less exalted times, Mr. Nunn shamelessly recycles ”Nickleby” business, as when he has the cast construct a train – last time it was a coach – out of found objects.)

The songs – and ”Cats” is all songs – give each cat his or her voice. If there is a point to Eliot’s catcycle, it is simply that ”cats are much like you and me.” As his verses (here sometimes garbled by amplification) personify all manner of cat, so do the tuneful melodies to which Mr. Lloyd Webber has set them. The songs are often pastiche, but cleverly and appropriately so, and, as always with this composer, they have been orchestrated to maximum effect. Among many others, the eclectic musical sources include swing (for the busy Gumbie cat), rock (the insolent Rum Tum Tugger), Richard Rodgers-style Orientalism (a pack of Siamese) and Henry Mancini’s detective-movie themes (Macavity, the Napoleon of crime).

But while the songs are usually sweet and well sung, ”Cats” as a whole sometimes curls up and takes a catnap, particularly in Act I. The stasis is not attributable to the music or the energetic cast, but to the entire show’s lack of spine. While a musical isn’t obligated to tell a story, it must have another form of propulsion (usually dance) if it chooses to do without one. As it happens, ”Cats” does vaguely attempt a story, and it also aspires to become the first British dance musical in the Broadway tradition. In neither effort does it succeed.

If you blink, you’ll miss the plot, which was inspired by some unpublished Eliot material. At the beginning the deity-cat, Old Deuteronomy (an owlishly ethereal Ken Page), announces that one cat will be selected by night’s end to go to cat heaven -”the heaviside layer” – and be reborn. Sure enough, the only obvious candidate for redemption is chosen at the climax, and while the audience goes wild when the lucky winner finally ascends, it’s because of Mr. Napier’s dazzling ”Close Encounters” spaceship, not because we care about the outcome of the whodunit or about the accompanying comic-book spiritualism.

As for Miss Lynne’s profuse choreography, its quantity and exuberance do not add up to quality. Though all the cat clawings and slitherings are wonderfully conceived and executed, such gestures sit on top of a repetitive array of jazz and ballet cliches, rhythmically punctuated by somersaults and leaps.

It’s impossible not to notice the draggy passages in a long number like ”The Jellicle Ball,” or the missed opportunities elsewhere. To a tinkling new music-hall melody that Mr. Lloyd Webber has written for Mungojerrie and Rumpleteazer, Miss Lynne provides only standard strutting. The stealthy Macavity number looks like shopworn Bob Fosse, and the battle of the Pekes and the Pollicles in Act I could be an Ice Capades reject. For the conjuring cat, Mr. Mistoffolees, Miss Lynne’s acrobatics never match the superhuman promise of either the lyrics or the outstanding soloist, Timothy Scott.

It’s fortunate for ”Cats” that Miss Lynne is often carried by the production design and, especially, by her New York cast. At the risk of neglecting a few worthy names, let me single out such additional kitties as Anna McNeely’s jolly Jennyanydots, Donna King’s sinuous Bombalurina, Bonnie Simmons’s tart Griddlebone, Reed Jones’s railroad-crazed Skimbleshanks and Harry Groener’s plaintive Munkustrap. Aside from the dubious intermingling of British and American accents – which is not justified by the uniformly English references in the lyrics – the only real flaw in this large company is Terrence V. Mann’s Rum Tum Tugger, who tries to imitate Mick Jagger’s outlaw sexuality and misses by a wide mark.

By virtue of their songs, as well as their talent, there are two other performers who lend ”Cats” the emotional pull it otherwise lacks. Stephen Hanan, singing Gus the Theater Cat to the show’s most lilting melody, is a quivering bundle of nostalgia and dormant hamminess who touchingly springs back to life in an elaborate flashback sequence. (He also contributes a jolly cat about town, Bustopher Jones, earlier on.) To Betty Buckley falls the role of Grizabella the Glamour Cat and the task of singing ”Memory,” the Puccini-scented ballad whose lyrics were devised by Mr. Nunn from great noncat Eliot poems, notably ”Rhapsody on a Windy Night.” Not only does Miss Buckley’s coursing delivery rattle the rafters, but in her ratty, prostitute-like furs and mane she is a poignant figure of down-and-out catwomanhood.

One wishes that ”Cats” always had so much feeling to go with its most inventive stagecraft. One wishes, too, that we weren’t sporadically jolted from Eliot’s otherworldly catland to the vulgar precincts of the videogame arcade by the overdone lightning flashes and by the mezzanine-level television monitors that broadcast the image of the offstage orchestra conductor (the excellent Stanley Lebowsky). But maybe it’s asking too much that this ambitious show lift the audience – or, for that matter, the modern musical – up to the sublime heaviside layer. What ”Cats” does do is take us into a theater overflowing with wondrous spectacle – and that’s an enchanting place to be.